ISSUE 2.17

Knowing Technology

Hi! Have this incredibly lovely acoustic track which will soothe your heart even as my newsletter makes it more annoyed: Richard Houghten - Millions of Birds. It even has some surprise synths and electronic elements toward the end.

This well-dressed man unplugged from all of society the moment Trump was elected and has spent the rest of his life living completely apart from news entirely, coasting on the results of past investments and listening to white noise when he orders coffee in the nearest town 30 minutes away (seriously). Part of me admires the completely self-imposed ludditism of it all, fantasizing about living in a world where nothing happens, barring the day that I eventually die from the radiation poison that has sunk into my creekwater unbeknownst to me due to my news blockade. The other, much larger part of me hates this guy for being such a wimp. There's some attempted redemption in the article along the lines of community projects that give back, but, you know, whatever.

Hey, while we're talking about ways to avoid the internet, why don't we just upload our minds to it? Only trick is that it literally has to kill you first. This is because they take your literal brain and deep freeze it for optimum storage, which has to happen ideally while you're alive (until you're not). Of course, Silicon Valley is ready with the spin--that little part of the equation is why "we are uniquely situated among the Y Combinator companies." Regardless of the bizarreness of it all, they're doing some interesting stuff with the science, such as "preserving a pig's brain so well that every synapse inside it could be seen with an electron microscope." I hope that pig gets some sweet digital afterlife perks.

Ignoring the ridiculously overworked title and terminology like "shitbeast", this is a robot that's designed to replace the wolves that were originally asked by the Japanese in the 1870s to ward off wild animals from their fields. Truly, technology can fix nature's problems! Snark aside, just hearing the phrase "reintroduce wolves" makes me feel cooler.

You ever go onto YouTube, watch one dumb video with a little more cleavage (or conspiracy theory) than you'd like to admit to, and next thing you know your YouTube homepage is haunted by it for weeks? Yeah, that's what this article is about, roughly--the weirdly, increasingly bubbled, volatile, enticing, extremist channels into YouTube that watching it will send you down. Not just the weird, though--the particularly untrue, such as searching for flu vaccination info leading to anti-vax conspiracy theories.

In 2018, self-driving cars were in 6 accidents in Cali--two of which had pissed off humans shouting at and slapping the cars. Both of the cars actually had human assistant drivers, too! All this because, I don't know, some people are stupid and angry about things?

OK, this one is like 3 years old (sorry) but a goodie. Melbourne gave trees email addresses so people could report tree problems (um... too sappy? loose leaves? bad attitudes?), and instead people sent love letters to their favorite trees. I love it. I wonder if the city read the emails aloud to the trees? (Now I want to go to a forest and do slam poetry for nature.)

Way's Notes

Hello!

Hi! How are you? It's my last day of vacation tomorrow (today as you read this) and somehow I feel tired. Something about missing my workouts for the last two days, drinking too much over the weekend, few days of skipped meditations, too much takeout, maybe? Boy oh boy, the universe is kicking my ass on the details. I'll get there eventually. Anyways, enough about me--let's talk about stuff.

I got to meet DocPop! Cool dude who was in Austin for SXSW--it was great to hang out with him for a hot minute, and meet his friends (shout out to Aziz). And if you're based in Austin (or will be there on the 30th), vurv.co, a tech-arts collective, is doing their first collective "Hello" with a variety of code-based pieces. Link to tickets for that here.

What else? What else? I've been reading an interesting book on Tibetan dream yoga lately--the conceit is that if you can control your dreams with great lucidity, it's similar to the experience after death, which, you know, maybe, cool. But I particularly love an emphasis on real life as being just as dream-like as dreams, sometimes, because I have noticed this. You get lost, carried along in dreams, generating thoughts and feelings that go to and fro with no particular choice--it's all reaction, resulting from predisposition and lack of clarity. Waking life is very much the same, which is hard to notice until you realize that you've drifted away from conscientiousness in the present moment to thinking about a show, a book, a lover, a fight, a vacation, a dream, for ten minutes straight. Whoa! Where did I go? Was I really in control?

Which brings me to the minutiae of things, the day-to-day living. I'm struggling with procrastination and vague not-wanna-do-it-feelings about various things that clearly need to get done but my procrastinative defensed are well-groomed and -grooved from years of being a just-bright-enough-to-put-in-mediocre-effort student in high school and college. These behaviors too appear to be emotional dispositions that generate actions and tendencies, which, left unexamined, result in my playing Lazy Galaxy for hours while binging Netflix shows I don't really care all that much about. (I even just clicked into that link and wandered through the reviews of a game I already own and enjoy. Why? I don't know.) Ah, to be human-minded and human-distracted! There's work on the self, and the idea of self that has to be done. Off to it, then.

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